THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. First let me thank all of you
for coming. I'm sorry we were a little late getting here -- maybe we
were just a little slow on the uptake after yesterday. I think you
know we had another stop to make before we could come up. But I'm very
grateful to you for being here.

I thank Alan Solomont and Dan Dutko for being here and for their work
for our Democratic Party. Thank you, John Goldman, and all the other
co-chairs of this event.

This has been an interesting weekend for Hillary and for me, and I'm
actually glad to be here. And when Mayor Brown said what he did -- I
think I came to California in my first term more than 30 times. I
don't know if I can come out here anymore. (Laughter.) If I come out
here anymore, Willie will have me paying taxes in San Francisco.
(Laughter.)

But I do want to say that I'm very grateful to the people of this
state not only for the support that I have received -- Al Gore and I
were fortunate enough to carry California both in 1992, and by an
even bigger margin in 1996 -- but also for the work that was done by
Californians with our administration which made it possible for us to
help California to make the comeback that is now evident to everyone.

It was always clear to me that this state, which was, effectively,
the sixth biggest economy in the world and had 13 percent of the
population of America, had to make a big economic comeback in order
for America to come back. This state which has so much racial and
ethnic and religious and other kinds of diversity has to be able to
prove we can live and work together in order for America to be able
to live and work together. So I feel very much rewarded by the
experience that Hillary and I and the Vice President and others have
had not only personally, but by what we have been able to achieve
together. And I thank you for that.

You know, Hillary told you we went to this seminar last night
that was chaired by Bill Perry and Warren Christopher about the
expansion of NATO -- something I do feel quite passionately about.
But it was ironic that Strobe Talbott was there giving the speech,
our Deputy Secretary of State, because the very first time I ever
saw Stanford was in February of 1971, when he took me there to see
the woman who is now his wife. I still remember everything we did;
I remember the movie we saw. It made a very profound impression on me.

But we were talking last night about the world we're
trying to build and leave our children, and that's what I'd like
to ask you to think about. You know, the Scripture says, "Where
there is no vision the people perish." Whether you believe that,
or not, it is perfectly clear that no change occurs that is
positive unless someone has imagined it. And at a time when
things are changing anyway, when the way we work and live and
relate to each other and the rest of the world is very much in
flux, it is absolutely imperative that we have citizens and
leaders who can imagine the future in a different way, so that we
can shape it in the way that we want our children to find it.

The reason I'm thinking about it is we were talking
about that last night in terms of the world. I said, one of the
things I admired about President Yeltsin is he has a great
imagination. He can imagine a future for his people very
different from the one they have endured. In 27 years in prison,
Nelson Mandela could have just shriveled up inside, but instead
he bloomed like a flower in the desert and he came out full of
imagination about new and different ways to bring people together
who had literally been butchering each other for a long time.

The great thing about the former Israeli Prime Minister, the
late Itzhak Rabin, is that he could imagine a future in the Middle
East where he made peace with people he had spent his whole life
fighting.

So if you think about where we are here as a country, I am
profoundly grateful for the results which have been achieved. I am
glad we've got the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years. I'm glad
we've got the lowest poverty rate ever recorded among African
Americans. I'm glad we've got the biggest drop in inequality among
working people in the last two years we've seen in decades. I'm glad
that the crime rate has gone down every year I've been President and
we've had record numbers of reductions in people on the welfare rolls.
I'm glad for that. I'm glad for the fights that we made.

Sometimes I think it's easy for people who are reporting on
current events to forget that there is quite a difference here in
who stands for what. The Family and Medical Leave law, for example,
has enabled millions of people to take some time off when they're
children are born or someone in their family gets sick. One party
was overwhelmingly for it; the other party was overwhelmingly against
it -- although there were some Republicans, thank God, who stood by
and helped us.

The same thing is true on our efforts to expand health care
coverage. In this last budget, $24 billion in the balanced budget
is allocated to help provide health insurance to half the kids in
this country who don't have it. Does anyone really believe that
would have happened had it not been for the Democratic Party? The
answer is a resounding no. I can tell you, I was there.

We had the biggest increase in investment in education since
1965 -- in a generation; the biggest increase in helping people to
go on to college of all ages since the G.I. Bill was passed 50 years
ago. You can now get a $1,500 tax credit for the first two years
of college, which opens community college to every person in the
country. More Pell Grant scholarships, more work-study, other tax
credits and deductions for all the other years of higher education
for Americans of any age. We have finally created an environment in
which we have opened the doors of college to all Americans who are
willing to work for it.

This is a stunning achievement; it will change the future of
America. No one can seriously argue that it would have happened had
it not been for our party. That was the contribution we made to
this balanced budget agreement. That was our driving passion. And
so I say to you, there are consequences to the outcome of elections
that affect people, that we can too easily forget.

And as you look to the future, in spite of all these
good results -- that's the point I'm trying to make -- this is
not a time for America to sit on its laurels. Why? First of
all, because everything changes. But the rate of change today is
so breathtaking -- yes, so we balance the budget and we have
invested in our future and we've expanded trade. But what are we
going to do tomorrow to keep this economy going, until everybody
who needs a job or a better job or an education has a chance to
participate in the economy.

Well, one of the things we have to do is keep expanding trade.
I want Congress to give me the authority every previous President for
the last 20 some years has had to expand trade. I do not want the
Europeans, in effect, to have a bigger foothold in Latin America than
we do; in Chile and Argentina and Brazil. That would be a terrible
mistake. Two-thirds of our trade growth -- two-thirds of our trade
growth has come from our neighbors, from Canada to the southern tip of
South America, in the last year. We dare not walk away from that.

I want to keep working on education until every school in
America looks like the one that I visited today in California, where
every school is like a charter school, in the control of the parents,
the students, the teachers and the principal; where red tape is low
and expectations are high and the school only stays in business as
long as it does a good job. That's the only way we're going to save
public education in a modern world. And we need to have that kind of
result. And we need to keep working until we get there.

So there is a lot still to be done. The world still is not
properly organized, although we're getting there, to deal with the
security threats that our children will face. I hope to goodness
by the time I leave, we'll really be able to say there's no reasonable
prospect of a recurrence of a nuclear dominated world, where people
will really be in fear of one country dropping a nuclear weapon on
another. I hope we'll be there. And we're working hard with the
Russians to get there, and with others. But we will have to face the
fact, when I leave office in January of 2001, that the open borders
we're creating, and the open commerce we're creating, and the explosion
of technology we're seeing makes it possible for the organized forces
of destruction to wreak havoc among decent people of the United States
and throughout the world. And we must be organized to deal with
terrorism. We must be organized to deal with drug traffickers. We
must be organized to deal with people who purvey ethnic and religious
hatred into the butchery of hundreds of thousands of people, whether
it's in Africa or Europe or any other place in the world. We have to
be organized to deal with that.

There's lots to do. And I just want to say that I started with
a vision; I wanted to be able to say when I left office that every
child in this country would have the opportunity to live up to his or
her own dreams and capacities if he or she were willing to work for it.
I wanted to be able to say that we were still the world's leading force
for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world. And I wanted to be
able to say that amidst all of our increasing diversity, we were coming
together as one America -- respecting, even celebrating our differences,
but bound together by things that unite us, more importantly.

And every day, I fight against the things I think will undermine
that and I fight for the things I think will advance it. And all you
have to do is to go back to our -- to the fight on family leave and the
budget fight in 1993, the fight for the assault weapons ban, for the
Brady Bill, for 100,000 police on the street in 1994, the fight against
the Contract On America in 1995, the fight against taking the guarantee
of medical care away from our poorest children, the fight against
taking away all that federal aid to education that was helping us to
advance opportunity -- just go through every single decision that's
been made in the last five years -- most of you who have come here to
help us could have made more money in the short run helping the other
party. You came here because you thought we needed to go forward
together and because you shared that vision.

I'm here to tell you that we need to keep on with that vision
because we, in spite of all the good times, we dare not rest. We have
too much to do, too many people to lift up, and too many new bridges
to cross before we get to that new century. And thanks to you, we're
going to be able to do it.